Tulsi Gabbard is a thirty-three year old combat veteran and a Democrat Representative for Hawaii. She is also in the midst of learning a harsh lesson in Democrat politics. One does not stray off the Democrat's plantation.

Rep. Gabbard's sin is to be harshly critical of President Obama's refusal to admit that the atrocities being committed around the world by soldiers of Allah for the glory of Islam are in any way associated with Islam. Ms. Gabbard, calling the President's refusal to make the association "mind boggling," has opined:

Every soldier knows this simple fact: If you don't know your enemy, you will not be able to defeat him. . . Our leaders must clearly identify the enemy as Islamist extremists, understand the ideology that is motivating them and attracting new recruits, and focus on defeating that enemy both militarily and ideologically.

She could not be more correct. She is sounding a theme made on this blog for a decade now. And yet, for making that point repeatedly in the wake of the most recent ISIS atrocities and the like, Rep. Gabbard is now suffering the consequences of speaking against the party line:

Her comments have stunned political experts in her home state.

“It is very, very unusual for a junior member in the president's own party to criticize him,” said Colin Moore, assistant professor at the University of Hawaii Department of Political Science. “Especially for someone considered a rising star in the party. This is a serious gamble for her.”

Michael W. Perry, of Hawaii's most popular KSSK Radio's "Perry & Price Show," said that "while Gabbard is correct in her 'emperor has no clothes' moment, she may have lost her future seat on Hawaii's political bench." He said she's committed "a mortal sin" by challenging Obama, and "now the knives are out."

For now, she's taking her hits in the media.

The editorial board of the online political news journal Civil Beat, owned by eBay Founder Pierre Omiydar, said "the bright-red Right" is promoting her criticism but she is not "presenting serious policy arguments."

"One wonders where Gabbard is going with this. Sure, the Iraq war veteran and rising political star is achieving national prominence in a high-profile discussion. But at what cost?" the editorial board wrote, saying her comments could be dismissed "as pandering from a young pol with lofty ambitions."

Bob Jones, columnist for the Oahu-based Midweek, wrote a scathing piece suggesting Gabbard should be challenged in 2016. "I take serious issue when somebody who's done a little non-fighting time in Iraq, and is not a Middle East or Islamic scholar, claims to know better than our President and Secretary of State how to fathom the motivations of terrorists, or how to refer to them beyond the term that best describes them -- terrorists," Jones said.

Right, because the Obama foreign policy as regards Islam and the Middle East has been such a ringing success that it shoudl be beyond debate. What an idiot Mr. Jones is.

As to Ms. Gabbard, a free range intellectually honest democrat is so rare to spot in the wild, really. Haven't seen any since the days of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Zell Miller. Well, maybe Manchin. Jury is still out on him. But one that looks good on a beach in Hawaii . . . that's unique.

Friday, February 27, 2015

Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents - Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. . . . There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing.

As bad as the news is today in the domestic arena (FCC, Illegal Immigration, IRS, HHS), the actions of the Obama regime in the international arena are orders of magnitude worse. For while all the destruction Obama has wrought in the domestic arena can, theoretically, be fixed, the same is not true of his duplicitous and suicidal dealings with Iran, where the stakes are so high and so time sensitive that to get it wrong is to court apocalyptic disaster.

Iran is the penultimate rogue state. I won't recount all the facts, you can read them here. Suffice it to say that Iran, a theocracy being run as a violent, crony capitalist police state, is as dangerous to the world as a rabid dog is to everyone within range of its fangs. Its leaders are every bit as irrational, triumphalist, expansionist and evil as was Hitler. To allow the mad mullahs to obtain a nuclear arsenal is beyond unthinkable. A nuclear armed Iran presents an immediate existential threat to Israel as well as to all of Western civilization. Moreover, Iran's drive for a nuclear aresenal is already setting off nuclear proliferation in other Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, the nation whose toxic brand of Islam, Wahhabism, is the core ideology at the heart of ISIS, al Qaeda and virtually all Sunni Islamic inspired terrorism of our era. Imagine if you will, nuclear weapons diffuse throughout the deeply unstable Middle East. The hands of the doomsday clock will soom be spinning at the speed of a fan, and death on a massive scale virtually inevitable.

None of this is new. It is why, for years, our nation has tried to end Iran's nuclear program, and do it short of war. It is why there have been six U.N. Security Council Resolutions demanding an end to Iran's nuclear enrichment program. One would think that Obama and the left, who worship at the altar of international law, would demand that Iran do just that, end the program. That is the only viable option.

But Obama has, with the surety of Neville Chamberlain vis a vis Hitler in 1937, believed from the start that Iran's theorcracy are rational actors, people with whom he can negotiate. He sees the mad mullahs as potential partners in Middle East peace. And to that end, he has dismantled the crushing regime of economic sanctions the Bush regime built, block by block, in an effort to stop Iran's enrichment program short of war. And now, Obama is negotiating a deal with Iran that will allow their enrichment program not merely to continue, but "will put Iran on a glide path to the acquisition of nuclear weapons over a period of years."

Charles Krauthammer sounds the warning bells today:

The news from the nuclear talks with Iran was already troubling. Iran was being granted the “right to enrich.” It would be allowed to retain and spin thousands of centrifuges. It could continue construction of the Arak plutonium reactor. Yet so thoroughly was Iran stonewalling International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors that just last Thursday the IAEA reported its concern “about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed . . . development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

Bad enough. Then it got worse:

News leaked Monday of the “sunset clause.” President Obama had accepted the Iranian demand that any restrictions on its program be time-limited. After which, the mullahs can crank up their nuclear program at will and produce as much enriched uranium as they want. Sanctions lifted. Restrictions gone. Nuclear development legitimized. Iran would re-enter the international community, as Obama suggested in an interview last December, as “a very successful regional power.” A few years — probably around ten — of good behavior and Iran would be home free. The agreement thus would provide a predictable path to an Iranian bomb. Indeed, a flourishing path, with trade resumed, oil pumping, and foreign investment pouring into a restored economy.

Meanwhile, Iran’s intercontinental-ballistic-missile program is subject to no restrictions at all. It’s not even part of these negotiations. Why is Iran building them? You don’t build ICBMs in order to deliver sticks of dynamite. Their only purpose is to carry nuclear warheads. Nor does Iran need an ICBM to hit Riyadh or Tel Aviv. Intercontinental missiles are for reaching, well, other continents. North America, for example.

Such an agreement also means the end of nonproliferation. When a rogue state defies the world, continues illegal enrichment, and then gets the world to bless an eventual unrestricted industrial-level enrichment program, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is dead. And regional hyperproliferation becomes inevitable as Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others seek shelter in going nuclear themselves.

Wasn’t Obama’s great international cause a nuclear-free world? . . .

The deal now on offer to the ayatollah would confer legitimacy on the nuclearization of the most rogue of rogue regimes: radically anti-American, deeply jihadist, purveyor of terrorism from Argentina to Bulgaria, puppeteer of a Syrian regime that specializes in dropping barrel bombs on civilians. . . .

Do read the entire article. Krauthammer goes on to prudently recommend we reimpose sanctions on the mad mullahs and demand they stop enrichment. If we do not, if we allow Obama to complete this madness, we sign the death warrant of Western Civilization.

I attended the dinner in New York City last week during which Rudy Giuliani — an unexpected last-minute crasher — claimed President Obama “doesn’t love America.” The people there reacted the way you would when an angry uncle explodes at the Thanksgiving dinner table: with embarrassed silence. I had been told the dinner was off-the-record, so I didn’t write up his comments, but by midnight, the story was everywhere.

The left likes to sneer at “love of country” comments and, indeed, uses them to marginalize people who make them as tea party nutters. Their criticism rests on two unspoken propositions -- "How DARE You?" and "look at how stupid and unsophisticated this idiot is." This articulation of contempt does impact on those low information types in the middle, unfortunately. Proof of that is how quickly the left was to question Republican presidential candidates on whether they agreed with Guiliani. Dana Milbank at WaPo is making a cottage industry out of asking Got'cha questions of this type to Scott Walker than labeling him unfit for failing to answer.

Let me answer the question. One cannot be a leftie and love any country within Western civiization, all being based on the Judeo-Christian ethic and capitalism in its varied forms. Period. Lefties look to the history of their country and see it as either intrinsicaly evil as a whole or at least at its foundational level, because it was, ostensibly, founded on oppression and exploitation.

So how does a sophisticated leftie define love of country? It is not based on the past, it is based on a vision of the future. What the left has is a utopian “social justice” vision (Marx 2.0) for ______ (insert name of Western country here) that they love, and of course they love being in a society where they can gain the power to move it in that direction. Indeed, it’s their raison d’etre.

When a non-leftist like Guiliani says that he loves his country, he is basing that on it’s imperfect history, looking back realisticly and saying that the good has far outweighed the bad, and there is intense pride in being a part of it, warts and all. Questionable incidents are teaching points, not unforgivable sins that forever stain and corrupt.

Unfortunately, few on the right pose their love of country comments in full historical context, and no one on the left is ever asked a love of country question posed in the proper context, such as “Looking back on all of our history, all that has happened, do you love this country? Actually that last bit would really trip up most leftists, since they don’t know their county’s history beyond the grossly superficial — just enough to chant slogans. Obama is the poster child of this group.

A few notes on feminism before getting to Ms. Camile Pagalia, a "feminist" college professor and author. The left's claim of a "war on women" was always the purest of horse manure, as is the left's caricature of conservative men seeking to keep women barefoot and walking between the kitchen and the bedroom. I know of no conservative who does not unreservedly support equal treatment and equal opportunity for women. If simple equality were the goal of modern feminism, than this would be a non-issue.

But modern feminism, of the women's studies variety found in virtually every university, is something else entirely. For them, all of society is founded on "patriarchy," gender roles are evil incarnate, and every act of sex is rape. (Or at least sex with a male is. If the Vagina Monologues is to be believed, an act of lebian statutory rape is redemption.) The most recent cause celebres for modern feminism, at least when not pushing the campus rape epidemic or 72 cents on the dollar canards, appear to have been manspreading and men who happen to interrupt a woman during a conversation. True subjegation of women, as in the Middle East, or true sexual harrassment of women by anyone on the left is studiously ignored.

And in many ways, modern feminism has come full circle, taking society back to the point of devaluing women and encouraging women's sexual objectification to a degree beyond that of a fourteen year old boys most rabid fantasies. Modern feminists have killed chivalry and they deny the reality of genetics, all the while seeking special considerations for women. Modern feminism has far more to do with Stalinism than enlightenment and equality.

As regards genetics, they do happen to be real. In one respect, modern feminists deny that. The seminal example is the call to open the combat arms of our military -- and in particular, the infantry and special ops -- to women. Women have no place in those units. The military is not a social justice organization. To open those units up to women is to, of necessity, lower the physical standards as a general matter, let alone the impact on unit cohesion.

In another respect, modern feminist don't merely acknowledge the genetic differnce, they define "equal rights" within the context. That is in regards to sex. In order for a woman to have a "consequence free" sex life like a male's, she needs access to birth control. Modern feminists see government paying for that birth control as a "right" they deserve. And indeed, to take it a step further, and most importantly, modern feminists invariably seek to exclude parents from any influence on their daughters when it comes sex and birth control. It is, in my view, the single most toxic impact modern feminism has had on society.

Such is my take, and it is why I happen to have great respect for Camile Pagalia, a classical feminist who is quite willing to take on "modern feminism." This from a recent interview were she comments on modern feminism as well as "post struturalism," the most recent variant of "post modernism."

In your view, what’s wrong with American feminism today, and what can it do to improve?

After the great victory won by my insurgent, pro-sex, pro-fashion wing of feminism in the 1990s, American and British feminism has amazingly collapsed backward again into whining, narcissistic victimology. As in the hoary old days of Gloria Steinem and her Stalinist cohorts, we are endlessly subjected to the hackneyed scenario of history as a toxic wasteland of vicious male oppression and gruesome female suffering. College campuses are hysterically portrayed as rape extravaganzas where women are helpless fluffs with no control over their own choices and behavior. I am an equal opportunity feminist: that is, I call for the removal of all barriers to women's advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women, which I reject as demeaning and infantilizing. My principal demand (as I have been repeating for nearly 25 years) is for colleges to confine themselves to education and to cease their tyrannical surveillance of students' social lives. If a real crime is committed, it must be reported to the police. College officials and committees have neither the expertise nor the legal right to be conducting investigations into he said/she said campus dating fiascos. Too many of today's young feminists seem to want hovering, paternalistic authority figures to protect and soothe them, an attitude I regard as servile, reactionary and glaringly bourgeois. The world can never be made totally safe for anyone, male or female: there will always be sociopaths and psychotics impervious to social controls. I call my system "street-smart feminism": there is no substitute for wary vigilance and personal responsibility.

Briefly put, what is post-structuralism and what is your opinion of it?

Post-structuralism is a system of literary and social analysis that flared up and vanished in France in the 1960s but that became anachronistically entrenched in British and American academe from the 1970s on. Based on the outmoded linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and promoted by the idolized Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, it absurdly asserts that we experience or process reality only through language and that, because language is inherently unstable, nothing can be known. By undermining meaning, history and personal will, post-structuralism has done incalculable damage to education and contemporary thought. It is a laborious, circuitously self-referential gimmick that always ends up with the same monotonous result. I spent six months writing a long attack on academic post-structuralism for the classics journal Arion in 1991, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf" (reprinted in my first essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture). Post-structuralism has destroyed two generations of graduate students, who were forced to mouth its ugly jargon and empty platitudes for their foolish faculty elders. And the end result is that humanities departments everywhere, having abandoned their proper mission of defending and celebrating art, have become humiliatingly marginalized in both reputation and impact.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

From Jason Riley at the WSJ, discussing the nexus between the Justice Dept., race hustlers and suits brought against police departments for "patterns and practices" of discrimination:

Attorney General Holder accuses Americans of being afraid to talk honestly about race relations, then uses his office to scapegoat police departments for black pathology. The conversation that Mr. Holder wants to have about race assumes facts not in evidence. It is also the wrong message to send to the young black men responsible for so much violent crime. These lawsuits make excuses for behavior that ought to be condemned and distract from a much more consequential debate about black cultural attitudes toward work, marriage, parenting and the rule of law. What ails these black communities are the Michael Browns, not the Darren Wilsons. And Mr. Holder’s war on cops won’t change that.

Amen. The Justice Dept. under Obama has become a political arm of the left. When I think back on all the flack Alberto Gonzalez took for hiring a few conservatives, and then look at the uber-radicals that Holder has packed the Justice Department with -- and in particular the Office of Civil Rights (a misnomer) -- it boggles the mind.

When Samuel Adams said the quote above, he was in a meeting with several thousand other colonists. He had just been informed that the colony's Royal Governor would not allow the East India Company's tea to be returned to Britain. That tea had been shipped on consignment to America and subject to a tax not approved by the colonists. It was the final straw in a Constitutional crisis started by the British themselves in 1761 when they attempted to limit the rights of British citizens living in the American colonies. With Adams's pronouncement, the Revolution was inevitable.

The American Revolution was fought over British liberty. When Americans cried out, "No Taxation Without Representation," they were not innovating new rights. They were demanding the King honor a right of British citizens that dated back to 1215 A.D. and the Magna Carta. After the war, what America produced was a Constitution and Bill of Rights that, but with few changes, memorialized British liberties. Those liberties were neither conservative nor liberal. Rather, they were a series of systems very carefully designed to insure that the will of the people was paramount, that the will of the majority did not become itself a lawless tyranny, and that the powers of government be limited lest it too become a tyranny. To that end, the system the Founders designed very carefully diffused power over the three branches of government.

And for much of the last two and a quarter centuries, the system has worked brilliantly, albeit imperfectly. Policy disputes come and go. So long as they are resolved within the framework of our systems, than all is well. But the system has broken down now, in three very critical ways, two of which pose a long term threat to our liberties and one of which presents an immediate, catastrophic threat. All ultimately revolve around the most fundamental aspect of our system, Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution -- that the sole right to pass laws resides in our elected members of Congress.

One break is in the regulatory bureaucracy, addressed here and, most recently, here as regards the FCC plan to take control of the Internet. The second break is our Court system, addressed here. Both of those breaks can be corrected by Congress if and when they find the will to do so.

The most immediate, dangerous and quite likely existential threat to our system of government comes now from our President. For the first time in our Republic's history, we have a President legislating unilaterally. That is the very definition of tyranny.

The President is charged with the duty of executing the laws of our nation. As regards illegal aliens, the laws require that they be deported. How to effect that is legitimately within Presidential discretion. It is Constitutionally problematic that our President should choose to ignore those laws, claiming the right to do as being within his "discretion." But then Obama goes beyond that. He is in the process of affirmatively granting these illegals "the ability to obtain Social Security numbers, work authorization permits, and the ability to travel.” That's not discretion, that's legislation that can only be lawfully passed by the elected representatives of the people. Obama's actions are a direct threat to our system of liberties.

There is no question why the President is doing what he is -- for immediate political gain. The thought is that these five million plus new immigrants will be left wing voters who will, for a generation or more, alter the political balance of power in this country. I oppose that policy on political grounds, but that is for reasoned debate.

But the President's actions take this orders of magnitude outside the realm of a policy argument. This is a fundamental challenge to our system of government that needs to be fought on every level and by every means. If the President's action is allowed to stand, it marks the date of the end our nation as one based on the Constitution and rule of law. Any politician who does not oppose this action is quite simply a traitor to this nation. And if the legislature cannot stop this action, then we must hope that the Courts finally do their job of protecting the sanctity of the system. For if not, than, truly, we "can do nothing more to save the country."

Update: John Hinderaker at Powerline has some very tongue in cheek proposals for amendments to the Constitution in order to clarify, for the Obama administration, the scope and limits of their powers. The irony is that his proposals are quotes from the Constitution.

Anti-semitism is a dark stain on the Western soul. It dates back well over a millenium, and has been the cause of countless acts of unforgivable carnage. And for my entire life, I've never understood it. But now, thanks to Robert Avrech, the Emmy Award winning writer and blogger at Seraphic Secret, I finally do.

What I never understood was that anti-Semitism in the West has distinct causes occurring in different historical period. The first period stretches from about 800 A.D. to 1800 A.D. The Jews were in a diaspora, congregating as minorities in close, tight knit communities much of the world over. It was how they survived as a distinct culture. But, it also made them suspect in their home countries, and in an era of tribalism, it was inevitable that Jews would be suspect and scapegoated. The vestiges of tribalism still no doubt undergird some of the modern anti-semitism that we still see.

Between 800 A.D. and 1,500 A.D., Christians were under religious edict not to loan money at interest. Jews became the proto-bankers and money lenders for Europe. Every Royal Court, duchy, and even the Vatican had their Court Jew to handle their finances. These Jews became wealthy and powerful, and thus a very visible object of envy for some. And lastly, there was a very practical reason for anti-semitism during this period. Those who borrowed money did so willingly, those who had to repay their loans were not so willing.

At the end of the 18th century, socialism was born in the French Revolution, and with it, the modern era of anti-semitism. Socialism's greatest enemy is religion, specifically Judaism and Christianity, both of which are wholly entwined in the foundations, culture and law of Western Civilization. The two provide the moral and ethical codes that govern our world. Socialism would change that.

The goal of socialism is to deconstruct traditional Western society and remake it under the auspices of an omnipotent government that would use its police powers to create a new order of ostensible social and economic equality. Socialists want to replace God with government as the source of morality. Thus Judaism and Christianity are under constant and unrelenting attack from the left. Within this context, anti-Semetism in the modern era is simply the grafting on of a new motivation for an old, tribal hatred.

Then, of course, there is Islam. In the last half century, rabid Wahhibis and Khomeinists, who view all religions other than their own as blasphemy, have brought their own genocidal anti-Semitism to the mix. The left, happy to find another group equally dedicated to deconstructing Western civilization and driving out the Judeo-Christian religions, have happily welcomed the Islamists.

Now, to me at least, I can understand the genesis of anti-Semitism and why it is still with us today. It makes anti-Semitism no less evil, but understanding the motivations of those who profess this evil allows them to be more successfully challenged.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

What could possibly be worse for socialists than taking over a country that has already run out of other people's money? I'm not sure, but you could ask the newly elected left wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece. His happy talk during the election of feta cheese in every pot and ouzo on everyone's lips has already met the reality of needing to borrow other people's money, and the lenders don't have any intention of paying for Greece's free ride.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Yet, if the unelected members of the FCC decide today to take over the Internet, they can do so unilaterally, no vote of our elected legislators. They will be doing no more or less than the unelected members of the EPA did when they unilaterally opted to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Actually, that was even worse because it came on the heels of Congress's refusal to pass just such a law.

. . . Today, Congress does not solely wield the legislative power of our nation. Indeed, Congress is very far from even being the most important source of our legislation. Our nation now most clearly resembles the socialist regulatory bureaucracy of the EU, where mountains of regulations with the full force and effect of law are passed by unelected bureacrats. In our nation today, individuals, businesses, and private and public organizations can be fined, sanctioned, forced to close, and jailed for violating federal regulations that have never been subject to a vote by our elected representatives, nor signed into law by the President. The genius of our Constitutional system of checks and balances is wholly obliterated in the tyranny of our modern the regulatory bureaucracy.

This is a grave issue under Obama, but it is also much bigger than just his wholesale abuse of the regulatory bureaucracy. The growth and dictatorial power of the regulatory bureaucracy is a systemic toxin overlaid upon our government by FDR, and its substantial growth now threatens to wholly undermine our form of government, taking our most important legislation completely outside the purview of our elected representatives.

This has reached crisis proportions under Obama and his administration, who have utterly run amok, passing mountains of regulations drastically effecting our nation, all of which have bypassed Congress. . . .

The FCC's proposal to take control of the Internet is just the latest in the gradual extra-Constitutional collectivization of our society compliments of the left and a compliant Court system that has utterly failed in its fundamental duties. The regulatory system must be brought to heel or our nation will be unrecognizable in another half a century.

Monday, February 23, 2015

. . .“So make no mistake about it: National Socialism has nothing to do with Germany or the German people but is rather a violent extremist organization that has perverted the culture of Germany. It is an extremist ideology that thrives on the joblessness of Germany and can be best opposed by the international community going to the root of German unemployment and economic hard times. Let us not confuse Nazism with legitimate expressions of German nationalism. Stiff-arm saluting and jack boots are legitimate tenets of Germanism, and the German Brotherhood, for example, is a largely peaceful organization.

“So we Americans must not get on our own high horse. We, too, have bullied our neighbors and invaded them. We, too, have struggled with racism and anti-Semitism, slavery and Jim Crow. And our own culture has at times treated American citizens in the same callous way as the National Socialist do Germans. Before we castigate the Nazis, let us remember the Inquisition and the Crusades.

“In the face of Nazi challenge, we must stand united internationally and here at home — opposing workplace violence and man-caused disasters. We know that overseas contingency operations alone cannot solve the problem of Nazi aggression. Nor can we simply take out SS troopers who kill innocent civilians. We also have to confront the violent extremists — the propagandists working for Dr. Goebbels and Herr Himmler, recruiters and enablers — who may not directly engage in man-caused disasters themselves, but who radicalize, recruit and incite others to do so. One of the chief missions of our new aeronautics board will be to reach out to Germans to make them feel proud of German achievement. I want to remind Americans that Germans fostered the Renaissance, and helped create sophisticated navigation, mathematics, and medicine. This week, we will take an important step forward, as governments, civil society groups and community leaders from more than 60 nations will gather in Washington for a global summit on countering violent extremism. We hope that the efforts of those like Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Daladier and others will focus on empowering local communities, especially in Britain and France.

“Groups like the SS offer a twisted interpretation of German culture that is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s German-speaking communities. The world must continue to lift up the voices of moderate German pastors and scholars who teach the true peaceful nature of German culture. We can echo the testimonies of former SS operatives and storm troopers who know how these terrorists betray Germany. We can help German entrepreneurs and youths work with the private sector to develop media tools to counter extremist Nazi narratives on radio and in newspapers. . . .

Do read the entire post. It truly puts, not just Obama's actions, but the entire West's actions in horrid perspective.
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It is axiomatic that if you can't diagnose a problem or an illness, than you can't cure it. Thus, when you here Obama call the threat the West faces "violent extremimism," you can rest assured, the threat we face will never die. But the vast majority of those who criticize Obama are little better. Typical is the column in The Atlantic today by Peter Beinart calling for the threat to be labeled "violent Islamic extremists." That is a better, but still nowhere near specific enough to allow for the problem to be dealt with at its core. Like sharks, there are many different schools of Islam, only a few of which pose an aggressive danger to civilization, at least at the moment. Why is that? When our government answers that question, when they put the threat of "violent extremism" in that context, then and only then it can be dealt with effectively by encouraging, through opinion and, if necessary, physical means, the Muslim world to deal with the specifics of their faith that are at odds with civilization.

Friday, February 20, 2015

The war of ideas is the war that matters in regards to Islam. That is the one we need to win or our children's children will still be fighting the radical Islamicists long after we are gone. As I have pointed out for at least a decade, and contrary to what Obama has continuously claimed, the Muslims we are fighting are not motivated by some anamolous interpretation of their religion. They are the true believers in Wahhabi Islam and the schools of Islam Wahhabism has infected. And if that is to end, then we must support reformers who would bring their religion from the 7th century into the 21st.

This today from Zaid Nabulsi, a lawyer writing in the Jordan Times [reprinted in full]:

Enough is enough. It is time to speak out.

“Islam is innocent” is an incomplete sentence. Introspection is needed, for, if we shy away from reality, the alternative will be more images like those we witnessed last Tuesday night, when brave Lt. Muath Al Kasasbeh was burnt to death in a cage.

The inconvenient truth that is overlooked or willfully ignored by apologists for the indefensible is the fact that Wahabism, the cult of mediaeval austerity founded by Ibn Abdul Wahab (1703-1792), has over the last half century been exported to every mosque and school throughout the Muslim world until it completely enveloped mainstream Sunni Islamic teachings.

Wahabism has entirely replaced, and become, Sunni Islam; the two cannot be told apart anymore.

Some Wahabist teachings, which have permeated the air we breathe in the Muslim world, are simply irreconcilable with decent human values, especially the ones that declare that every non-Wahabist is a disposable body whose bloodletting is unproblematic.

So enough of this burial of our heads in the sand. It has become tiresome to keep hearing the unproductive cliché that Islam is innocent after each atrocity committed by devout fanatics who did nothing except execute the exact letter of their textbooks, which order them to slaughter the infidels.

The escapism that mainstream Islam has nothing to do with those atrocities does not hold water anymore because Wahabism and Islam have become indistinguishable.

To understand the crisis of Muslims today, one has to remember that Wahabism exists in several textbooks containing the alleged sayings of the Prophet Mohammad, or books of “Hadith”, revered by so many.

What we must confront is the undeniable fact that it is from many stories found in these books that the unprecedented cruelty of groups such as the so-called Islamic State and Jabhat Al Nusra emanates.

The problem today has nothing to do with the original spirit of Prophet Mohammad’s message. Nor has it anything to do with the tumultuous history of Muslims over 14 centuries, parts of which were no doubt glorious and enlightened.

The catastrophe today is with the visible manifestation of Islam in the modern world, as demonstrated by the prevalent beliefs and practices of many people who call themselves Muslims.

This negative image of Muslims is not all just smoke and no fire. This is what those 120 Islamic scholars who sent a letter to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi last year could not fathom.

IS did not invent a new Islam. On the contrary, its followers are strict adherents of the same textbooks quoted in that long letter (bizarrely addressed to “Dr Ibrahim Awwad Al Badri”, Baghdadi’s real name, bestowing intellectual respectability upon this mass murderer, as if one were writing a letter to the mayor of Copenhagen).

In fact, the scholars’ letter was a misguided attempt to disinfect Wahabism, to cleanse it from itself, by claiming that IS simply misinterpreted texts that are otherwise compatible with human decency.

In that sense, the letter squabbled over the semantics of the alleged instructions by the Prophet to spread Islam by the sword, but it did not dare renounce the authenticity of those same sayings.

Instead, the scholars argued that IS has simply taken those instructions out of context, and so they addressed the devotees of Ibn Taymiyah (the mentor of Wahabism, 1263-1328) with counterarguments based on those same problematic Ibn Taymiyah texts that IS employed to justify its barbarity.

The truth of the matter is that, faced with the IS and Nusra atrocities, Muslims cannot afford to give Wahabism a facelift.

If we truly want to defend Islam, we need to perform a much more invasive surgery.

Take the Muslim Brotherhood as an example of the prevalence of the Wahabist teachings among Muslims today.

The Brotherhood is the virtual womb that incubated all the current jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda itself (Al Zawahiri hailed from the Egyptian MB offshoot that murdered president Anwar Sadat).

Yet, when Abu Musab Al Zarqawi was killed in 2006, the three most senior leaders of the MB in Jordan brazenly visited the condolence house in Zarqa and announced to the media that Zarqawi was a martyr in the eyes of God, despite Zarqawi having blown up three hotels in Amman the previous year, killing scores of Jordanians going about their lives or celebrating a peaceful wedding.

We need not go too far back.

More recently, former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, of the MB, committed much worse deeds than his Jordanian counterparts while he was briefly in office, using his pardon prerogatives to release the murderers who carried out the 1997 Luxor massacre of 62 elderly European tourists.

Not only that, Morsi even appointed the leader of that group as a governor of Luxor itself.

The MB in Jordan, despite their token condemnation of the immolation of Kasasbeh, still refuse to describe him as a martyr.

Some may counter that it is poverty and economics, not Wahabist doctrine, that explain why so many Muslims are supportive of such murderous trends. This simply defies the facts.

The orgy of decapitations in Syria over the last four years was promoted by very rich Sunni clerics such as Yusuf Al Qaradawi and Mohammad Al Uraifi, aided by the countless satellite stations openly calling for the murder of Alawites and Shiites, and financed by billions from extremely wealthy but hateful Muslims.

So, enough with the denials. It is time to raise the alarm. We have a problem!

It is not a coincidence that for over a decade we, Muslims, dominated the world record in mindless televised massacres.

It is not only foolish to deny this fact, it is also dangerous, for we would be covering the cancerous tumour with a bandage.

What we cannot deny is that many of the Wahabist textbooks are the same operating manuals that Islamist butchers use to justify their savagery.

For example, very few people know that while Muath was being set on fire in that macabre video, the voiceover was a recitation of an Ibn Taymiyah fatwa deeming the incineration of unbelievers a legitimate act of jihad.

Ibn Taymiyah is not some obscure scholar on the fringe of Sunni Islam. In the Sunni world, he is universally venerated with the title “Sheikh of Islam”, elevating him to an almost infallible clerical status.

If we really want to defend Islam as a religion of mercy, if we really want to be believed when we proclaim the innocence of this religion, we need to do more than just repeat this meaningless mantra about us having nothing to do with IS.

We have to muster the courage to identify the specific texts that actually defame Islam, denounce them and permanently cleanse Islamic tradition of them.

Amen. This is what our nation's government should be giving its full throated support. Obama's claim that Islamic terrorism is separate and apart from Islam is not merely wholly at odds with reality, it works against people such as Mr. Nabulsi who would reform their religion in a war of ideas.

In the debate over climate change, the central allegation of the skeptics is that the science saying it’s real and a serious threat is politically tinged, driven by environmental activism and not hard data. That’s not true, and it slanders honest scientists. But the claim becomes more likely to be seen as plausible if scientists go beyond their professional expertise and begin advocating specific policies.

Those opposed to this radical plan do not contest "climate change," but fall along an entire spectrum from those who question whether carbon dioxide is the culprit to those who believe that the vastly overblown threat of devestation -- based on failed computer modeling -- do not justify the radical left wing plans.

Ignoring the varied concerns of all who oppose the left, Achenbach sets up a straw man who is irrational and being led astray by a small number of science prostitutes being paid by dark money for their advocacy. Achenbach compares his strawman to a litany of other irrational people in a list that bears some scrutiny:

1. People of Portland who refuse to floridate their water. Achenbach fails to note that Portland is the bluest of blue left wing cities.
2. Anti-vaxxers. Achenbach fails to note that this is largely a movement of the left.
3. Anti-GMO. Achenbach fails to note that this is almost entirely a movement of the left.
4. People who contested that the earth revolves around the sun in the 16th century.
5. Those who were concerned that ebola might be spread by airborne transmission.

That last one is particularly of note. Achenbach writes:

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy. Should we be afraid that the Ebola virus, which is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids, will mutate into an airborne super-plague? The scientific consensus says that’s extremely unlikely: No virus has ever been observed to completely change its mode of transmission in humans, and there’s zero evidence that the latest strain of Ebola is any different. But Google “airborne Ebola” and you’ll enter a dystopia where this virus has almost supernatural powers, including the power to kill us all.

Considering that ebola mortality can range from 20% to 90% -- figures on par with the mortality rate for the Black Plague that killed half of Europe in the 14th century -- only a fool would not be concerned. Thankfully, according to Achenbach, we are saved by the scientific consensus . . . . Or at least we were until, on Feb. 19, when the Washington Post ran a story, "Limited airborne transmission of Ebola is ‘very likely,’ new analysis says."

Perhaps the most offensive part of Achenbach's article is when he explains the scientific method, implying that the science of AGW is based on legitimate studies that can be reproduced by other scientists. Reproducability is the sina que non of science. The problem with so very much of AGW "science" is that the scientists do not put out sufficient information to allow their results to be analyzed by others. Steve MacIntrye has made a cottage industry out of trying to get AGW researchers to actually conform to the scientific method. The most recent glaring example of grad student Mike Wallace who wanted to analyze a study by two NOAA scientists that, they claimed before Congress, showed that the oceans were acidifying and in significant danger because of excessive carbon dioxide. When Wallace contacted the study's authors because their underlying data wasn't archived -- per the scientific method -- the authors gave Wallace the run around and then threatened his career for pursuing the matter further. It turns out that the study ignored all of the historic data that showed the oceans are not acidifying. The study was a fraud.

Wallace's experience is not an anamoly. As I pointed out in The Not So Settled Science of AGW, the scientists pushing anthropogenic global warming, as long ago as Michael Mann's hockey stick, stopped adhering to the scientific method and tried to substitute peer review in its place as the standard for reliability. It's a fraud and a travesty. Indeed, the greatest change needed in relation to government funding of science is an absolute requirement that any funded research requires the authors to post all information necessary for their experiment to be analyzed and reproduced. Anything less is not science.

After reading Achenbach's article, I am pretty sure that his target audience were those who blindly accept AGW. Achenbach is trying to reassure them of their intellectual superiority in comparison to the irrationality of the skeptics on the right. His problem is, like the science of AGW itself, his arguments do not withstand the least bit of scrutiny. As to the right, the science of AGW is so hard to believe because there are huge questions regarding the validity of the studies and computer models. As to the left and their problems with floridation, vaccines and the like, well, it would appear that they are irrational deniers of largely settled science.

"[Obama] is insulting, I think, to many millions of reform-minded Muslims who are trying to reject and push back theocracy," he told Fox News on Wednesday. "And the leader of the free world in the meantime is saying, 'Well, these terror groups are sort of coming out of thin air and it's just sort of a crime, education and a job problem' -- which is absurd and oversimplifying."

In what has to qualify as the understatement of the year, George Condon at the National Journal writes that Obama and his administration are "struggl[ing] with the language of terrorism." Actually, they're not struggling. They are, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, in "pathalogical denial" of the fact that mainstream Islam is motivating terrorism.

To put this in perspective, the U.S. had decimated al Qaeda by 2008. But in the aftermath, ISIS popped up. And assuming we deal with ISIS, you can rest assured that another alphabet Wahhabi or Twelver Islam organization will rise to take their place. (And do note, while ISIS is a threat, it pales in comparison with the threat posed by a nuclear armed Iran.) We will forever face an increasingly existential threat from Muslims unless and until the Islamic religion is torn out of its 7th century roots. That requires engaging in a war of ideas. But, as the WSJ Editorial Board points out, the "war of ideas" is one "the West refuses to fight."

Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Boko Haram and other jihadist groups are waging more than a military conflict. They are also waging an increasingly successful ideological war for the soul of Islam and its 1.6 billion followers.

Their version of jihad is gaining adherents precisely because it is motivated by an idea that challenges the values and beliefs of moderate Islam, the West and modernity. The free and non-fanatic world won’t win this deeper struggle if the Obama Administration refuses even to acknowledge its nature.

The 9/11 Commission Report put this front and center. Its second chapter, “The Foundation of the New Terrorism,” traces what it calls “ Bin Ladin ’s Appeal in the Islamic World.” It discusses the late al Qaeda leader’s faith in “a return to observance of the literal teachings of the Qur’an and the Hadith.” It underscores bin Laden’s reliance on Muslim theologians, from Ibn Taimiyyah in the 14th century to Sayyid Qutb in the 20th. And it explains how bin Laden turned Islam into a licence for murder. . . .

None of this is denied in the Muslim world, which is well aware of the increasingly radical bent of mainstream Islamist theology. Not for nothing did Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi recently visit Cairo’s al-Azhar university, Sunni Islam’s premier center of religious learning, to warn leading clerics of where Islam is heading: “Let me say it again, we need to revolutionize our religion.”

That’s exactly right, but it’s hard to see how such a revolution might take place—much less who might carry it out—if Islam can barely be mentioned in the context of a conference on “violent extremism.” In his speech Wednesday, Mr. Obama acknowledged that “al Qaeda and ISIL do draw selectively from the Islamic texts,” and he called on Muslim leaders to reject grievance narratives against the West.

But the President also insisted that the West must never grant al Qaeda and Islamic State “the religious legitimacy they seek” by suggesting they are Muslim religious leaders rather than mere terrorists. That’s a fine sentiment, but it elides the fact that the two categories aren’t mutually exclusive. The Islamic State may speak for only a minority of Muslims, but it is nothing if not Islamic in its beliefs, methods and aims. Ignoring that reality for the sake of avoiding injured feelings helps nobody, least of all Islamic State’s many Muslim victims or Islam’s would-be reformers. . . .

[W]hile ISIL may be the most visible menace, it is not the only threat. Across the region, violent extremists of all stripes have demonstrated their intent to roll back modernity and impose a reign of terror. . . .
While military force is necessary, the key to success over the long term will be what happens off the battlefield. . .
. . . [M]ilitary might and obstructing funders and fighters will not be enough. ISIL, al Qaeda and other groups are sophisticated modern organizations that use media and social networks to disseminate their ideology of hate and fear. More than provocative propaganda, these messages are nothing other than assassin recruitment ads and digital death threats that must be disrupted.
In one of the most effective approaches in this battle of ideas, Muslim leaders are directly confronting and discrediting the extremists who cloak their radical ideas and violent actions in the language of Islam. While often drowned out in US and European media, influential clerics are forcefully speaking out in the region for moderation and tolerance, developing new religious texts and helping to train a new generation of imams. . . ."

Terrorism is not an ideology; we are not merely fighting terrorists, we are fighting theocrats.

…If we start to define ourselves as in a war with theocrats, however, then I believe we can begin the process of delivering the military, political, economic – and maybe even the social – policies to counter this threat together, as we have in the past. In the last century, the world faced a series of overwhelming threats: fascism, totalitarianism, cold-war communism. They were studied, however, as concepts, understood and clearly defined. We addressed them, clinically, as ideologies.

So what do we call this new form of ideology, how do we identify it and how do we define it? We must agree the specific terminology and identified characteristics to take us to the very root of the problem we face. For one group alone, we already struggle with an absurdity of titles including Isis, Isil, IS and Da’ish. We see the likes of al-Qaeda and its various offshoots. We have al-Shabab and Boko Haram and that’s before contemplating yet unformed groups of their type that may develop in the future. In each case, however, we continue to hop blindly and haphazardly from one tactical threat to the other, without strategically understanding or categorising our foe. . . .

The Prince's choice of "theorcrats" as the identifying characteristic of the evil we face is subtle indeed. While the various organizations the Prince identifies above are aspirational theocrats, there is only one theocracy extant today, and it happens to be one that has spent the better part of the last thirty years attempting to destabilize Bahrain. That would of course be Iran.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

[W]e are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.

True, we are not at war with Islam. But a good portion of Muslim world is at war with us or otherwise supports those who are, and the basis for that is not a "perverted" interpratation of their faith. Their actions are found on the fundamental tentents of their religion. To claim otherwise is a complete denial of the last 1,400 years of history.

Muslims have been spreading Islam by the sword near ever since their religion was conceived in the 7th century. Islam has been the greatest imperial force the world has ever seen. Between the 7th century and the 18th century, Muslims conquered the Middle East, all of North Africa, Byzantium, a goodly portion of central Asia and India, Sicily, parts of Greece, and much of Spain. They threatened to overrun France until stopped by Charles Martel in the 8th century. By 1683, Muslims had conquered southern portions of Central Europe and were laying siege to Vienna, Austria. After 1683, Muslim nations stopped their wars of conquest.

The near three century hiatus the West has had from Islam's wars of conquest has not occurred because Islam has moderated. Islam has never had a Renaissance or Reformation. It was untouched by the Enlightenment. The Islam of today is the same militant, expansionist Islam of the 7th century. The hiatus in the wars of conquest came about simply because the West went through the Industrial Revolution and was too powerful for the Muslim nations to challenge. The only moderating influence on Islam has been the imposition of Western governmental forms in some of the Muslim countries. As Sultan Knish explains:

Islam never became enlightened. It never stopped being ‘medieval’. Whatever enlightenment it received was imposed on it by European colonialism. It’s a second-hand enlightenment that never went under the skin.

ISIS isn’t just seventh century Islam. It’s also much more recent than that. It’s Islam before the French and the English came. It’s what the Muslim world was like before it was forced to have presidents and constitutions, before it was forced to at least pay lip service to the alien notion of equal rights for all.

The media reported the burning of the Jordanian pilot as if it were some horrifying and unprecedented aberration. But Muslim heretics, as well as Jews and Christians accused of blasphemy, were burned alive for their crimes against Islam. Numerous accounts of this remain, not from the seventh century, but from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those who weren’t burned, might be beheaded.

These were not the practices of some apocalyptic death cult. They were the Islamic law in the “cosmopolitan” parts of North Africa. The only reason they aren’t the law now is that the French left behind some of their own laws.

Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia that were never truly colonized still behead men and women for “witchcraft and sorcery.” Not in the seventh century or even in the nineteenth century. Last year.

The problem isn’t that ISIS is ‘medieval’. The problem is that Islam is.

What progressives mistake for modern Islam, whether while touring Algeria or on the campus of their university, is really an Islam whose practice has been repressed by the West while its ideology remains untouched. Modern Islam is in a state of contradiction. It’s a schizophrenic religion whose doctrine calls for supremacism but whose capabilities prevent it from exercising the full measure of its doctrines.

Islam is the 90 lb. weakling that wants to be the school bully. It can’t punch you in the face, so it stabs you in the back and then blames someone else. When you punch it back, it plays the victim.

Terrorism and the march of ISIS accross the Middle East are not some anomaly of history, they are a resumption of it. That matters because:

“You cannot fight what you refuse to name… and you cannot win against something that you will not fight.”

We have no chance of avoiding continuous war, perhaps apocolyptic, with Islam so long as our governing class refuses to take the first step of acknowledging reality.

The left is pushing its agenda on numerous fronts, not the least of which is through IPCC and the canard of man-made climate change. Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent catastrophic global warming. To that end, see this from IBD:

At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said.

Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: "This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history."

The new economic development model is in essence a tax on the developed world, and very much in particular, the US, on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. That tax is payable to the UN for them to redistribute "in order to achieve sustainable development, poverty eradication and prosperity for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind." As Anthony Watts points out:

[T]hat is why the global warming scare is so hard to kill. The end game is world domination. With such a big prize – the biggest possible, facts aren’t even inconvenient. They are not part of the process. It has been a long slog but gird your loins for a battle that might last into mid-century.